THIS PAMPHLET HISTORY, one in a series devoted to U.S. Marines in the World War II era, is published for the education and training of Marines by the History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C., as a part of the U.S. Department of Defense observance of the 50th anniversary of victory in that war. Printing costs for this pamphlet have been defrayed in part by the Defense Department World War II Commemoration Committee. Editorial costs of preparing this pamphlet have been defrayed in part by a bequest from the estate of Emilie H. Watts, in memory of her late husband, Thomas M. Watts, who served as a Marine and was the recipient of a Purple Heart. WORLD WAR II COMMEMORATIVE SERIES _DIRECTOR Of MARINE CORPS HISTORY AND MUSEUMS_ =Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons, USMC (Ret)= _GENERAL EDITOR, WORLD WAR II COMMEMORATIVE SERIES_ =Benis M. Frank= _CARTOGRAPHIC CONSULTANT_ =George C. MacGillivray= _EDITING AND DESIGN SECTION, HISTORY AND MUSEUMS DIVISION_ =Robert E. Struder=, Senior Editor; =W. Stephen Hill=, Visual Information Specialist; =Catherine A. Kerns=, Composition Services Technician Marine Corps Historical Center Building 58, Washington Navy Yard Washington, D.C. 20374-0580 =1992= PCN 190 003119 00 [Illustration (back cover)] Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained. To make this eBook easier to read, particularly on handheld devices, most images have been made relatively larger than in the original pamphlet, and centered, rather than offset to one side or the other; and some were placed a little earlier or later than in the original. Sidebars in the original have been repositioned between chapters and identified as “[Sidebar (page nn):”, where the page reference is to the original location in the source book. In the Plain Text version, the matching closing right bracket follows the last line of the Sidebar’s text and is on a separate line to make it more noticeable. In the HTML versions, that bracket follows the colon, and each Sidebar is displayed within a box. Page 18: Missing closing quotation mark added after “Airon 24”. Page 19 (Sidebar originally on page 17): “And, too, the three carriers committed to the relief expedition were all there were in the Pacific.” was printed that way. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Magnificent Fight: Marines in the Battle for Wake Island, by Robert J. Cressman